Arts/Entertainment

July 13, 2015

As one who spends a fair amount of time on various NASA web pages, I have to believe that this is an exciting time for coders/web page gurus to be working at NASA and its contracting agencies. Gee whiz - some of the effects they come up with, that provide scientific education. They offer lots of toys!

One of the apps offered is NASA's Eyes Visualization, which I downloaded in order to access NASA's Eyes on Pluto. There are lots of controls to determine what one sees. Below is a pretty "plain vanilla" screen shot from the simulation.

April 04, 2015

Hunky Husband, during the 13 years when we were apart became a Country & Western music fan. I blame the wild women with whom he kept company; but, it could also have been the influence of our younger daughter, Bogie. One of HH's favorite recordings is Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places".

Well, HH may know the music, but I have the friends!

History: When I retired at the end of April, 2004, I planned to pursue volunteer endeavors. Not only did I wish to have something worthwhile to accomplish, I needed to find some women friends. Having been schooled and employed in settings where the populations were overwhelmingly male, I now had the opportunity to add to my paltry number of women friends. After all, I reasoned, when I wanted to go do something, it would not be seemly to call up a male friend to see if he wanted to join in.

Now: I have learned that, even more-so than was true of the workforce where I was employed, the volunteer workforce is a constantly fluctuating group. Only the employees stick around long enough with whom to build a long-term friendship. Well...that's OK; but, employees tend to need to be at work...and...they tend to be much younger. Thus, the friends that I've made in my nearly 10 years of volunteer work in disaster response are employed and younger and, just as when I was employed, I rarely see them outside work. In addition, all of the employees in the Wichita office are recently hired young people under age 40! To see any of the employed friends I've made while volunteering, I must travel.

Travel: During the month of March, I drove to Kansas City MO, twice, for 2-day meetings at FEMA's regional offices each time. (Yay!) It was wonderful getting to see all of my FEMA and other governmental friends - going out to lunch or chatting during breaks. It was a shot in the arm, for me!

Now we get to low places: You can't get much lower than some of the small towns in the great Midwestern part of the United States. When I was born, five generations of my family lived in/around a small community in Missouri comprising (I'm guessing) 300 souls. The last I checked that town, Milo, it was down to 68 souls.

When Hunky Husband and I moved to Derby KS in 1960, the population was about 7000. Derby is still small (it is now a bit over 23,000); but, it's no longer the case than I know every merchant by name or that all of the city officials recognize HH and me on sight.

Pratt KS is a city, approximately 90 miles WNW of Derby, with a population of just under 7,000 these days. There is one person in that town who is employed by the organization with which I volunteer, and there is a dedicated volunteer who is three months younger than me - 1938 having been a vintage year for the birth of baby women! The three of us get along famously. Every couple of years, I receive a request from Donna, the employee, to come help Ruby, the volunteer, with her computer challenges. I've never felt that Ruby needed the help, but I've always been happy to go spend a few hours with them - which I did Thursday.

I understand what it's like to run a small office that is distant from the parent organization, having "been there, done that" at Tyndall AFB FL in the early 1980s. (I had a handful or so of engineers, there, while my Program Manager was in McLean VA and my Line Manager was in Albuquerque NM.) Thus, I can empathize with Donna that she really, really needs to have an "outsider" off of whom to bounce ideas and obtain updates of information.

In this case, it took about 10 minutes for Ruby to realize that, what she had thought she needed to learn to do (write equations in a spreadsheet using variable values from a different file), she had learned to do on my next previous visit, a couple of years ago. From that point, we were free to exchange ideas/knowledge concerning a new program that Donna has been assigned to run for the organization, covering the states of Kansas and Nebraska and the Southwestern corner of Iowa.

Not only did I get to visit with my friends, but they bought my lunch and gave me posies (photo, below). And there was no one on the streets or in the restaurant or in the "general store" where we stopped to buy a cuppa who didn't call Donna by name - including the driver of the fire truck that was cruising down the street when we came out to get back into my car. (I gave Donna a lesson in driving a push-button car - my 2014 Lincoln MKZ - which she thoroughly enjoyed. Ruby, being a bit more timid, declined the opportunity to drive a strange car. I cannot talk with passengers while driving, so always try to get someone else to do the driving when I'm not alone.)

Prologue: This posting would have been made yesterday had we not had a big wind blow through just after midnight on the 3rd (that is, a few hours after my return from Pratt). HH always watches the weather, so he was smart enough not to put our trash cart out on Thursday night for pickup on Friday morning. Unfortunately, our neighbors were not. Two neighbors in our Home Owners Association are missing their carts - and trash. I, personally, retrieved enough trash from our yard to fill 1/2 of the space in our own trash cart - the trash having come from three identifiable households. There were spotty power outages in the Wichita vicinity, which meant that HH went into the office to help them evaluate the damage and establish a respite center for those who had lost power and needed it to run their medical support equipment.

Last but not only not the least (because - she's the most!): Bogie celebrated a birthday, yesterday. She was enjoying the day when we called her. Enjoy the posies in the photo, Bogie!

March 13, 2015

This song came up on my mp3 flash drive during my drive home from Kansas City MO last evening. It had been a few years since I had heard it, but I found that I could sing along. Not bad for someone who is not a Glenn Campbell fan, eh? (My singing isn't that great; but, singing in the car is like singing in the shower - no one seems to mind, when I'm alone!)

If you enjoy fiddling, you might like this version. (I can only take "so much" fiddling. As a youth, I played the same violin that my father had taught himself to play; but, I never got beyond 2nd chair 1st violin in our high school band, and quit playing after 8th grade. Yes, 8th grade was in the high school building and we were integrated with grades 9-12 in some classes.)

I'll close with the version of Bonaparte's Retreat that I actually recall - from my childhood (I was 10 when this recording came out) - by the inimitable Ms Kay Starr!

Re: Singing in the car

WIWAK, there being no radios in most vehicles, our family sang on long trips. It's a practice of which Hunky Husband has no understanding. (Unfortunately, my parents grooved on Country & Western music so I learned only that type of song!!!! Want to hear Strawberry Roan or Barbara Allen? I didn't think so.) I've never heard HH sing, and I recall his not liking when his mother or sisters (one of whom later performed in operas - most memorable being Carmen) sang around the house. HH's father sang in a Barbershop Quartet for several years, in his 80s and early 90s. Similar to Leonard's not being allowed to whistle in his own home, I am not allowed to sing or whistle in my own home - unless I am alone.

Double Dutch

In playing The Strawberry Roan video by Marty Robbins, I was treated to an ad for Three Muskateers®. If you tried the link and got a different ad, you may (or may not!) enjoy the opportunity to view it, alone.

March 04, 2015

Stu has a posting, César Manrique, in which he mentions Joan Miró, the muralist known for his "bird people". As happens, Wichita State University owns a Miró that is in process of being restored. This photo (below) is from the WSU website. The text preceding (and after) the photo is taken from that website.

The Ulrich Museum of Art, which opened in 1975 as part of the McKnight Art Center, is recognized by Joan Miro's landmark glass and marble mosaic, Personnages Oiseaux (Bird People), on the south facade. The museum's galleries show exhibits from the University's collection which features contemporary art, plus traveling exhibits.

The museum is named for Edwin A. Ulrich, a Hyde Park, N.Y., businessman who donated his collection of more than 300 works by Frederick Judd Waugh and established an endowment to support the museum. The Ulrich is also internationally known for its Martin H. Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection, named one of the Top 10 campus art collections by Public Art Review magazine.

Conservation of museum's signature Miró mural is the number one priority for the Ulrich Museum collection. A restoration project was launched on September 27, 2011, was preceded by a two-and-a-half-year exhaustive research study of the mural and a pilot treatment of three panels. The re-installation of the mosaic on the Ulrich Museum facade will take place in fall 2016.

February 01, 2015

August 04, 2014

BTW: the original of the Google Doodle is, as usual, interactive. One may choose a category of thing and a characteristic. The Venn diagram is then formed to show the intersection thing category ∩ characteristic.

Cool!

____________________

P.S. have a quibble with the illustration oftransport ∩has wings. The Doodle shows only an airplane. Why not a rotor craft? Just because its wings rotate doesn't make them ineligible.

Last February 1, Stu included a comment in an email to me. He wrote, “BTW, a Kansas City amusement park now has the tallest water ride in the world! Looking forward to reading the ride-report by you and HH this summer :-)”

I replied:

If you can get Worlds of Fun/Oceans of Fun to shut out the other visitors for a few hours, I’ll arrange to go try out the Mamba ride for you – assuming that’s the ride to which you refer. The first hill takes one 200 feet above ground – which shouldn’t be thrilling to a crop duster! [Note: Although I have hours of flying crop duster planes, Stu has many more hours actually dusting crops! CC]

When our daughters were young, I would take them on the “thrill” rides at the local (now closed) amusement park – to spare their acrophobic father. However, I let their grandparents (in Kansas City) take them to the more crowded venue. I took my nephew on rides at one of the smaller amusement parks in California; but, even when I lived in Florida or California, I did not visit the Disney venues. I’m not bothered by heights or gees, but I am very bothered by crowds. Hate ‘em!

As it worked out, it seems that Stu was not referring to the Mamba ride, (I had missed/ignored "water" in Stu's note - my mind does that sometimes) but to the Verruckt water slide that was scheduled to open in late May. (Opening was delayed for modifications to the slide when the first weighted raft to be sent down it went over the edge. In addition to modifying the slide trough design, a safety net was added that encloses the trough along its length.)

Well...my comments still stand. Either looks like it would be a lot of fun - if they would get the crowds to stay home so that I would have the whole place to myself.

One of the reasons that I use the activity center for swimming and working out is that, as was true today, I am sometimes the only person in the pool, the only person in the women's locker room, AND the only person in the weights room. How fabulous is that!?!